The video distribution industry (broadcast TV stations and satellite, cable and Telco pay TV) has traditionally met subscriber demand by offering a combination of entertainment, sports, and news. The technology employed to distribute the content is actively transitioning from live broadcast to Internet IP-based streaming of video assets. This transition is relatively seamless for VOD content, but it can be difficult to deploy and to scale for distributing live events. New “over the top” TV services are largely confined to VOD content, with limited attempts to deliver live news, sports, and weather.
TV broadcast networks (CBS, ABC and others) are offering VOD content on-line, and some networks are beginning to deliver linear channels over IP. Such streaming content can be accessed for playback in real time or near-real time via a mobile app, a PC browser or TV-specific platforms such as Apple TV or Roku, but on-demand access to live assets is limited. Content access limitations include the cost and complexity of packaging live feeds into discrete on-demand events, the finite storage depth of the origin and encoding systems, and the finite buffering capability of the player devices. Often pausing a live IP feed is only possible for a short time, and playback from the beginning of a live event that started in the past is not possible or constrained.
Pay TV service providers (Comcast, Dish and others) are offering subscribers the ability to store and playback content from network-based devices (n-DVR, c-DVR). Such network devices are hosted in a public or private cloud and provide similar capabilities to an in-home DVR by copying each live event to a file. This approach brings many of the same restrictions of in-home DVR solutions. In some implementations the subscriber is required to set a recording time for an event, or else playback will not be available. Moreover, if the actual airtime of an event changes due to a change of schedule (such as is common for live sports) the recording will reflect the scheduled time and not the actual adjusted airtime, and complete playback of the event will not be possible.
Internet VOD services such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, iTunes and others deliver movies and TV series episodes over IP, by unicasting multiple VOD sessions originated from copies of a single video file using VOD origin servers. Some of the content can be recorded from live sources and re-purposed for VOD access, but this repurposing requires a complex, laborious and time-consuming conversion process that restricts content availability. As a result, VOD access to live recorded content is only available after a significant delay from the original content airtime.
Prior Art utilized by broadcast TV, Pay TV and Internet TV service providers includes the design and integration into service of a combination of VOD Origins, Linear Origins, File-based Time Shift Buffers (TSB), live encoders/packagers, just-in-time encoders/packagers, network digital video recorders (N-DVR), cloud-based digital video recorders (C-DVR), and various hardware and software systems attempting to implement catch-up TV services and start-over TV services, subject to various well-known limitations.
The prior art also includes distributed data storage and retrieval systems.